Yahtzee Feelings

Imagine this: you’re sitting, nice and comfortable in your plastic house. It’s dark, but you don’t have eyes so that doesn’t matter. Your life is a calm bliss. It’s just you and your four friends. None of you can move or speak, but they are your friends, you go everywhere together, you live together. And suddenly, light begins to shine into your little home, although since you don’t have eyes, you don’t notice. What you do notice is the tremor that goes through your house and the surrounding area. Suddenly you’re being lifted into the air and violently shaken around. Soon after you are thrown onto a hard surface where you wait a few cold moments and then are thrust back into your home to repeat the process.

Man, being a Yahtzee die must suck! I mean, it has to, did you not read the previous paragraph? That would be terrifying. We’re constantly abusing these dice for our own amusement. Is that right? Should we be doing this?

But what if the top paragraph was wrong? What if the dice love to be thrown? It is their purpose in life after all, why shouldn’t they love it? If they were created to be rolled and rolled and rolled, shouldn’t a life of stillness be torturous to them. But then what of ambition? What of the occasional die that just wants to be something more?

I don’t know, and since we can’t as of yet converse with dice we may never know. So the choice is yours. You can continue rolling your dice to your heart’s content. Or you can lock them away and hope they have a peaceful life. Either way you may be condemning them to a life of torture. You’ll never know if you were right or wrong. You’ll just have to live with your decision and hope for the best. Just something to think about next time you play games with your family.

A Youtube Problem

I’m going to quickly take you through a scenario I went through last night. I watch a lot of videos, right, and I post a lot of videos on the internet. Youtube is one of the places I visit most. I was going to watch some videos from the people I subscribed to. I loaded up the homepage and clicked on the first video I saw that was interesting in my feed. At which point I was greeted with this:

So after that I did the perfectly logical thing of panicking. I immediately thought about all the places I could have visited that would have given me a virus. All of the ads I may have clicked on, all the pop-ups I would have gotten from clicking on said ads. Then I shut down my computer and restarted it. I booted Safari back up and was treated with the ability to watch videos… for five minutes. After that I was given the same screen as last time (though it does change everytime you reload). At this point I was near hyperventilation. I shut the system down again and even installed all the updates I have been neglecting. Do you know what that takes for me?

I went crazy, like I need Youtube or something? I then went to sleep because for some reason I was watching videos at midnight. The next morning I still couldn’t watch videos. so I frantically searched around the internet, even going so far as to copy paste some of the gibberish into Google (which found nothing). Until I eventually found a post on a forum that was about the same problem as mine. It turns out that it kind of worked itself out for some people and it appeared to be a problem with Youtube and not my computer. I could also watch videos right after looking at this post, almost as if by magic.

My reason for writing this really is to warn you about the internet. Think about a site that you would panic if it went down (it didn’t help that Tumblr was down at the same time). See if you could go a day without it. And then begin coordinating your panic procedure, because you can’t, you know you can’t, I know you can’t, and no one else has to get hurt because of your panicking.

The Speech to Save the Itsy Bitsy

What do you know about spiders? Spiders are traditionally itsy bitsy right? No? As it turns out there are at least 8 types of spider in the waterspout climbing family. Incy Wincy, Eency Weency, Inky Binky, Inky Dinky, Ipsy Wispy, or Ipsy Dipsy are the various species. Terrifyingly enough, these are just the kiddy ones, and I’m gonna leave out more than just the Blooming Bloody spider to spare your sanity.

The real point here is that we need to protect these innocent spiders from the evil rain. What did these poor spiders do to deserve such abuse again and again? Nothing, and I propose we act now. I’m tired of children having to sing about this horrible issue and nothing being done about it.

I propose that we build a network of false water spouts. These will be in place all around the country to provide a safe haven for the spiders of this rare genus. The plan I have laid out sets aside $13 billion a year of our funds for construction and upkeep of this network. These spiders will no longer have to die for such frivolous reasons. Please help us, we need you support, please, for the children.

What Makes a Post Freshly Press-able: WordPress is Self-centered (Occupy wall street, election, cats, babies, space, etc…)

Every day nineteen or so people appear on the front page of wordpress.com. This is the freshly pressed section that is the first thing seen by all who enter wordpress. Regardless or whether or not the posts are freshly pressed they are there, and many people wonder why those who end up there do. It seems like it has something to do with the ideas expressed in the post or the relevance of said post to current events. But lately there has been one or two freshly pressed posts about wordpress itself and mainly how to get freshly pressed.

I can understand how one or two can be relevant, even in sequence, but for over a month having a post about yourself on the front page is pushing it. I would understand if wordpress was mainly about itself, but it isn’t. My impression was that the freshly-pressed section was to highlight some of the better blogs out there (or at least the better posts). WordPress is about the community, and when the site keeps highlighting itself it just comes off as self centered.

I mean really wordpress, what about all those other bloggers out there, like me? Why can’t we (I) be on the front page? I mean I do great stuff, and none of it is ever appreciated. Just because you created and maintain the best blogging service and software on the web doesn’t mean you can be selfish about it. Just because you facilitate my ability (read: addiction) to Blog you think you can just promote yourself over me.

And what about what info I can consume? I could be reading about the “occupy …” protesters I don’t like, or the upcoming presidential election I hate everybody in, or someone’s post about their cat, or babies, or about wasting resources looking at and landing in space, but no, I can only read about wordpress. WordPress, wordpress, wordpress. Shame on you wordpress!  Didn’t your mother teach you about humility?

A Tie Sampler (With Designer Thoughts)

I have a lot of ties, I mean a lot. I have, like, an eccentric schoolteacher number of ties. And the number keeps growing, and growing. I think on average I get a couple each week, although that is an average from getting none for quite a few weeks and then buying many of them when I get the chance and they have good ties at the local vintage stores.

I never really thought about it much, but it seems that I do have quite a few, and I enjoy the more wacky ties. So I thought why not share them with you on the internet. (it wasn’t actually my idea, but I liked it) And as a bonus, we’ll get a look inside the designers heads.

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First we have a kind of strange tie depicting Winnie the Pooh and a butterfly.

What was going through the designers head: Winnie is a bear right? Bears live in nature right? Butterflies also come from nature. I Just finished my tie design six hours early.

Then we have this one, made up entirely of french posters partially covering each other.

What the designer was thinking: Man, my poster collection is so cool. If I scanned one in and overlapped it like a collage I’m sure it would be a hit in every market.

I think this is my favorite, it’s just a toothbrush and toothpaste. With the toothpaste being three-dimentional.

What was going on in the designers head:  Crap, isn’t it such a coincidence that I got toothpaste on my tie that looks like it got toothpaste on it. If only the toothpaste had looked more real in the first place, then maybe this wouldn’t be a problem. Wait, I’ve got it.

Next we have an uncomfortably close picture of marvin the Martian, made exclusively for six flags.

What was going through the designers head: Humph, why do I get stuck with making the marvin tie? I’ll show them. I’ll make it almost unrecognizable.

Finally we have one covered in various writing implements and school supplies.

What was going on in the designers head: This tape we make for classrooms is great, I wonder what else we can make with this. Steve runs a silk factory, I bet he’ll know!